BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On The Media -I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The investigation reported by Dan Rather on 60 Minutes II earlier this month was indicting, to say the least. Based on taped interviews, Pentagon records and newly surfaced documents, CBS concluded that President Bush had not only benefitted from political connections to get into the Texas National Guard in the midst of the Vietnam War, but failed to meet his Guard commitments and ignored direct orders to do so. The smoking gun: copies of memos from Bush's commanding officer complaining of political pressure to go easy on the son of a Republican big shot.
BOB GARFIELD: Three decades later, this may or may not deserve to be a big campaign issue. With a bloody war currently raging and vast social and economic problems to deal with, maybe the events of 1972 don't much matter. But truth always matters, and the CBS investigation, following similar revelations by the Boston Globe, the Associated Press and U.S. News & World Report, paint an unflattering portrait: a candidate for presidential re-election who -- when his country first called -- abused political privilege and his comrades' trust, and has been hushing up the facts ever since. And it took only one day for all hell to break loose -- not putting the president on the defensive, but rather Rather. The poster child for liberal media bias had to deal with the very plausible accusation that the smoking-gun memos were fakes. [START TAPE]
DAN RATHER: Are those documents authentic, as experts consulted by CBS news continue to maintain? Or were they forgeries or re-creations...? We will keep an open mind, and we will continue to report credible evidence and responsible points of view as we try to answer the questions raised about the authenticity of the documents. [END TAPE]
BOB GARFIELD: That was Rather on Wednesday, only two days after categorically vouching for the memos on the CBS Evening News. As of Friday, the authenticity question had yet to be definitively answered. What was most definitively answered was how a journalistic bombshell can get defused.
BRANT HOUSTON: At this point, I believe that that is overshadowing the rest of the story....
BOB GARFIELD: Brant Houston, professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, is executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc.
BRANT HOUSTON: It is a nightmare, I think, for somebody that's worked on an investigative story with integrity and with persistence, to have something like this happen, it really is.
BOB GARFIELD: He's speaking of CBS News, if it was in fact duped by forgeries. But there is also the question of the other news organizations whose investigations have drawn identical conclusions based on hundreds of interviews and official Pentagon records. The September 8th Boston Globe piece, for instance, demonstrated that young Lt. George Bush twice signed pledges to fulfill his service requirements on the penalty of being called to active duty, yet never met his commitments. But here is what the head of the Globe investigative team, Walter Robinson, heard in the very first question of his interview on the NPR talk program The Connection: [START TAPE]
DICK GORDON: Last week, you and Associated Press, CBS -- you were all over these new documents, and then a weekend of questions about their authenticity - and I'm not sure where we are right now. Where are we?
WALTER ROBINSON: Well, I just, I want to make an important distinction. The documents that we and the Associated Press reported on are the official military records of President Bush.
DICK GORDON: Okay?
WALTER ROBINSON: The documents which CBS was trying to... [END TAPE]
BOB GARFIELD: For Robinson, the implications of this confusion were all too clear.
WALTER ROBINSON: Well, I was thinking if the host of The Connection has managed to morph all of the reports about Bush's military service into one that is dominated by the issue -- "Are all these documents authentic?" -- how is it possible for the average voter to make any sense out of this?
BOB GARFIELD: What's the answer to that question?
WALTER ROBINSON: Well, the answer is: for most voters, probably not much chance at all right now.
BOB GARFIELD: Especially when the Fox News channel labels the controversy "Rathergate" and rhetoric from Republican leaders implies that the suspect memos were forged by the John Kerry campaign to discredit the president. Of course, there have also been raised eyebrows among Bush haters, who noticed how rapidly the White House distributed the disputed memos to reporters, and how even more rapidly bloggers materialized to impeach their authenticity. Watergate figure John Dean, who's confessional testimony finally sank his boss, Richard Nixon, is no stranger to political dirty tricks.
JOHN DEAN: I'm one who happens to believe that there are Karl Rove sleeper cells that need very little instruction to, to thrust themself into action.
BOB GARFIELD: In any event, he says, for the clouds hovering over the president's service record to be blown away by a tempest about liberal bias in the media was a political windfall for the Bush-Cheney campaign.
JOHN DEAN: This goes back to Bush I, and it goes back to, even to Watergate and Dan Rather and beating up on Republicans. So it-- obviously [LAUGHS] - this is the Perfect Storm for this situation.
BOB GARFIELD: For his part, the Globe's Robinson is fairly philosophical about what he calls the "story du jour."
WALTER ROBINSON: Well, I, I think at the moment, the bigger story is clearly -- was CBS the victim of what would be, in recent American political history, a fairly extraordinary hoax. I mean we play a substantial role in the political process -- we in the media -- and if such a large news organization on an issue of such importance -- the president's integrity --gets duped, then that's a story.
BOB GARFIELD: But evidence of military dereliction by a future war president is also news. And Robinson worries that--
WALTER ROBINSON: Facts for Bush's own records about his lack of fidelity to his Guard service seemed to have escaped public notice because of skepticism about one news organization's reporting on them.
BOB GARFIELD: In those worries, he is not alone. As more and more attention is paid to the disputed memos at the expense of the underlying story, the liberal media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Media has looked at Rathergate and seen not just another three-ring media circus, but a badly managed one. It's the equivalent, Fair observes, of covering the sideshow and ignoring the center ring. [MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The now long-running investigation into which senior administration official leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame grinds on. This week, Time magazine's Matt Cooper was served with another subpoena, and so was Judith Miller of the New York Times. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus managed to avoid one, because his source identified himself to prosecutors. Earlier this month, Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, publicly came forth saying he had spoken to reporters but not revealed the agent's name. Of course, the only reporter to actually use the information was columnist Bob Novak, and if he felt any moral or professional obligation to name his source, he probably couldn't have run with the leak, but he could, and did, attributing it by journalistic tradition to a couple of (quote) "senior administration officials." That's a phrase applicable to just about anyone above a certain government pay grade. How can we figure out which senior administration official is which? Harry Jaffe, national editor at Washingtonian magazine, recently penned a field guide to the senior administration official -- in Washington parlance, the SAO. Harry, welcome to the show.
HARRY JAFFE: I'm pleased to be with you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So let's go through some of the tips you offer readers in your guide. If the quote, say, concerns the Middle East, who's likely to be the SAO?
HARRY JAFFE: If it's the Middle East, I would say Elliott Abrams.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what if it's about Europe?
HARRY JAFFE: The European specialist is Dan Fried.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And how about economic affairs?
HARRY JAFFE: Ah, this is a sticky wicket here. It used to be that the most talkative one was Greg Mankiw. He's the president's chief economist. He's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. Then he made a comment that you might recall about the fact that outsourcing jobs was good for the economy. We haven't heard very much from him-- [LAUGHTER] recently. Good chance it's Rob Nichols, who is the chief spokesman for the Treasury Department.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, the reporter could make this whole process a little more transparent by offering those locational guides -- for instance, State Department official, Defense Department official, and so forth. But usually, the laws of Washington journalism prevent that, don't they?
HARRY JAFFE: Well, a deal is cut every time there is an interview. The terms of engagement -- whether it is off the record - on background - on deep background - not for attribution -- these are part of the negotiations of almost any interview in this town.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so if they don't say State Department, it means that the reporter was told - you just have to attribute this to the administration in its vastness.
HARRY JAFFE: Well, I can tell you that every journalist starts with the desire to quote the person by name. It may be hard to grasp, but we journalists actually do like to serve readers, and readers, we know, want to know who the actual person was behind a quote. So we begin by saying can we quote you "Greg Mankiw" and he says - no. Then how can we quote you? Can I quote you as an economic advisor? No. [LAUGHTER] Can I quote you as someone who is a top official of the Treasury Department? No. How about a senior administration official? Okay. [LAUGHTER] So it's a slippery slope down to a guy walking down the street who happened to take an economics course in college.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right. So, Harry the most inflammatory use of the SAO in recent times was in the aforementioned Bob Novak column -- his highly-placed senior administration official revealed the identity of then-CIA agent Valerie Plame. What can you deduce about that unnamed source, using your guide?
HARRY JAFFE: Well, I would think that the principal suspect here is Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Cheney's shop has the reputation of being more politically-attuned and also a little bit more of a bunch of knife-fighters. I mean, look -- the other name that was on the tips of everybody's tongues in Washington was Karl Rove. This clearly became a very important political matter.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And the release of Valerie Plame's name would be seen as a political move, because her husband, Joseph Wilson, had written in the New York Times that Iraq had not sought uranium from Niger, as the government had contended.
HARRY JAFFE: Joe Wilson became an enemy. Let's use Novak to discredit Joe Wilson. But your question is, and our unanswered question is, and the prosecutor would like to know -- who was that SAO?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Would you like to see the abolition of the phrase "senior administration official" from all newspapers?
HARRY JAFFE: Absolutely. I think that there should be names behind quotes, as much as possible. Let's at least say that this is a high-ranking official -- give us a department at least. National Security Council. You know, Council of Economic Advisors. I think the question becomes, you know, does it really help the reader to know who is the author of a particular quote. I think yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And the likelihood of the disappearance of the SAO from newspapers?
HARRY JAFFE: Well, I actually think that it may be a glacial change, but I think if there is pressure on newspaper reporters from inside and from readers, and I think that while it may not happen next week or certainly before this next election, I think that in the future we're going to see better identification of sources.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Thank you very much.
HARRY JAFFE: Appreciate being with you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Harry Jaffe is the national editor at the Washingtonian.
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps complains about terrible judgment -- at the FCC, and Candidate Kerry clams up.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. We in the media have loudly complained about the relative lack of access granted by President Bush. Over the past three and a half years he has given a mere 15 solo press conferences -- the least of any president in 50 years. By way of contrast, a President Kerry would grant one press conference per month -- or so he promised at a campaign stop in Wisconsin on August 3rd. But it turns out that Candidate Kerry is not quite so generous with his time. He last made himself available to traveling reporters who sit just a few yards away in the back of his campaign plane on August 9th. Here to talk about this recent brownout by the Kerry campaign is Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi. Paul, welcome back to the show.
PAUL FARHI: Thanks, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you've taken three trips on the Kerry campaign plane since he was nominated. Is this a sudden change in access?
PAUL FARHI: It's been gradual. We're now in a new phase, obviously. It's less than two months before the election, and the stakes are incredibly high, and the campaign, I think, is taking no chances. They feel that if they gave unlimited access or even partial access to Kerry, that the chances for, one, a slipup or two, for Kerry stepping on his daily message of the day would be high.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That is a legitimate concern though, isn't it? Either slipping up or changing the focus --it's happened.
PAUL FARHI: Yes. Back in August 3rd, he gave a brief interview to the press pool, and he was asked whether he had any regrets about his vote on the Iraq war resolution, and he said in effect, no - no regrets. And of course he has since been put on the defensive about that statement and has had to explain and re-explain himself for the last month.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's often been noted that Al Gore actually alienated his press corps, and suffered thereby. Is the lack of accessibility in the Kerry campaign breeding resentment?
PAUL FARHI: Yes, I was in Cincinnati with him last week, and we were all fired up, because they passed the word that he was going to come out and make a statement, which suggested to us that he was also going to take questions. We were all arranged on the tarmac at the airport. He read a statement for about 26 seconds or so, and he turned his back and walked away, and-- it's moments like that that make you feel like a campaign stenographer rather than a campaign reporter -- we are being fed what the campaign wants us to have and not, obviously, what we'd like to know about. And-- you could hear, literally, people fuming about - and [LAUGHTER] see people fuming about the way we were treated at that moment.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think this media strategy is working or working against him?
PAUL FARHI: In their own narrow way, it is working. What they want to do is have a message that they have crafted and have that as the only message that gets out. In Kerry's case, he's basically saying - and in Bush's case as well - they're basically saying - here is your news and here is your only news - and that's what we want you to write about. And to the extent that we can't ask them the other questions, we only have a very few options about what the story of the day is going to be -- and it turns out that it's the story they want us to have.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But what do you think this suggests about Kerry's campaign promise to make himself available every month as president if he's not willing to do that as a candidate?
PAUL FARHI: The campaign aides were telling me that this only applies to when he's president. It doesn't apply [LAUGHTER] to when he's on the campaign trail. So, take your pick.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, as you said in your article in the Washington Post, which is why we called you up, he makes himself available to regional reporters, especially in swing states; he'll go on Don Imus. He just tends to shirk his responsibilities to the boys and girls at the back of the bus.
PAUL FARHI: When you sit down with a publication or a news outlet, you probably have prepared certain points you want to make. It is only the illusion of spontaneity, really, that you're giving in those sessions. Whereas on the campaign trail, you open yourself up to considerable risk if you step in front of the microphones and take it from all sides.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about the vice presidential candidate, John Edwards?
PAUL FARHI: He seems to be a little bit better, but not really too much better. I covered Edwards back when he was still alive in the primaries, and he did have a, a certain accessibility, and he did try a little bit harder to make himself available. Now I think he's sort of getting the message from the Kerry handlers that that's not the way we do things around here, and he's cut back somewhat.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's compare now Kerry-Edwards with Bush-Cheney. Back in 2000, we saw that documentary by Alexandra Pelosi, and we saw Candidate Bush getting very chummy with campaign reporters. How about this time around?
PAUL FARHI: Not at all. His contact with the press, even in those informal kinds of ways, has become extremely limited. Back in 2000, he had a lot of get-to-know-you sessions with the reporters. He gave them nicknames. Now, of course he's president, the circumstances have changed, and the reporters on his campaign plane - on Air Force One -don't get to see him much at all.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you know, we have heard that John Edwards is sort of the charming side of the John Kerry campaign, and I think it's safe to say that Dick Cheney does that for Bush, right? [LAUGHTER]
PAUL FARHI: No comment. Cheney's even worse than Bush. Cheney is by far the least accessible and most difficult to deal with.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, Paul, thank you very much.
PAUL FARHI: Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Paul Farhi is on the campaign trail for the Washington Post. [MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This week, dissident FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein held one of their trademark town meetings in Dearborn, Michigan. Appealing to the public over the head of FCC Chairman Michael Powell, they always ask roughly the same question: Do you like how the airwaves are being used? Mr. Copps, for one, emphatically does not. As the Republicans gathered last month in Madison Square Garden, Copps decried the networks' skimpy coverage in the New York Times, and while condemning the general state of broadcast TV, he heartily bit the hand that feeds him. Could you read that part, Commissioner?
MICHAEL COPPS: I'll be happy to. [READING] The FCC is doing nothing to help, as the situation deteriorates. It has weakened almost every explicit duty stations once had for serving the public interest - like ensuring that stations cover local issues and offer viewers a diversity of opinion. Just as bad, the Commission eliminated protections against media consolidation last year, even though critics warned that this would result in even less local coverage. Luckily, a federal court rejected this decision, so we have another chance to save these rules.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You noted that the courts rejected the FCC's reasons for lifting some of the remaining restrictions on media ownership. Where does that issue stand now?
MICHAEL COPPS: Excellent question. On June 2003, the Commission passed these rules, greatly loosening the ownership caps. Since that time, the American people, the Congress and the Courts have gone on record saying the FCC has made a mistake. The United States Senate voted to overturn the entire decision. Has since voted again to do that. Went to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals said the reasoning that you gave us for these rules is substantively flawed. Do it over. So that's the good news. Now, the bad news is -- where do they send these rules back to? They send 'em back to the very same Commission that dreamed them up in the first place, and herein is the challenge -- because big media doesn't cover this issue and tell the American people what the state of play is, a lot of folks will read a story about -- the Senate voted today to overturn the rules and think - oh, boy - the forces of justice and right prevail -- or the court sent them back. Whoopee. In reality, we're right back where we started.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: One of your principal beefs with media consolidation is that you believe it reduces the coverage of local issues. Do you have any data to back up your position?
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, I think there's all kinds of data. We know that in the 2002 so-called "off-year" elections, over half the newscasts had no mention whatsoever of the congressional and local races. We know that political ads probably outweigh political stories by about 4 to 1, too. But I can just tell you time and again -- I remember being out in Phoenix at a, a hearing about a year ago and the mayor or the former mayor was talking about when he went there, and they had media diversity and lots of stations and newspapers. He said people used to just -- in fact, they opened the door to go out and get a bottle of water or take a rest break or something one day, and about three reporters fell through the door, because they were lined up to find out what was going inside. Now that city has a very consolidated media environment, and he says you can't get anybody to come out and cover these events.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, the networks' shrinking convention coverage sparked your op-ed piece, but the public did have ample opportunity to see the convention -- even the 17 percent that don't have cable or satellite could have tuned in to PBS -- but they didn't. Are you saying that the networks should provide this coverage even if the public has amply demonstrated that it doesn't really care?
MICHAEL COPPS: I don't think the public has amply demonstrated that, and I don't know how networks are in a position to say that they have. You know, we don't even require, any more, broadcasters to go out and do what used to be called "ascertainment" and finding out what people really want to hear and what people think needs to be on. So this is - this is yes, oh, we're giving the people what they want to hear. That's within a very narrow parameter. They're giving the people what they want to hear -- that-will-make-money-for-them on the niche groups that they're targeting.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is it perhaps just too late in the day for the networks to sort of cycle back and start offering the hours to civic duty type coverage that you would want them to?
MICHAEL COPPS: Absolutely not. My little op-ed piece focused on the convention because that was the news du jour. But this is ongoing. It has to do with the entire democratic dialogue. It has to do with local races as well as national races. I would love to see them step up to the plate and say, boy, we're really in an important time here with the war, the health care crisis, education, all these things-- to cover it. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You would love to [LAUGHTER] that and a quarter won't even get you a cup of coffee in New York.
MICHAEL COPPS: [LAUGHS] No, but that and public pressure might just get it done.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thanks very much.
MICHAEL COPPS: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michael Copps is a Democratic Commissioner of the FCC. [MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: First, some quick history. For most of the 25 years since the Islamic Revolution, Iranians have lived under the strict moral and religious guidelines imposed by the un-elected conservative clerics. But in the aftermath of the devastating Iran-Iraq war, a disillusioned populace swept the reformist candidate Mohammed Khatami into the presidency. His liberal agenda promised a new era of freedom that everyone, especially the press, had been yearning for. The clerics, of course, fought back --imprisoning democratic leaders and murdering writers, artists and intellectuals, silencing students and closing newspapers. In the last parliamentary elections, voter turnout was abysmal, because the clerics had disqualified more than half of the reformist candidates. As a result, conservatives recaptured Parliament for the first time in a decade, and throughout the world, the reform movement in Iran was declared dead. And yet, a new film suggests that that announcement may be premature. Taghi Amirani is an Iranian born director who's lived in London since 1975. His documentary Red Lines and Deadlines portrays daily life at one of Iran's few remaining reform newspapers. Shargh is just a year old, but it has already learned to walk Iran's perilous political tightrope. Taghi, welcome to the show.
TAGHI AMIRANI: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It seems the reform press has to execute a very graceful dance to negotiate these strict but ill-defined laws of censorship known as "the red lines." [WOMAN SPEAKING IN ARABIC]
INTERPRETER: The first red line in our country is the leadership. This is Shargh's most important red line. Not only do we refrain from criticizing him, but we also try to ensure that our reporting is appropriate and our writing style is compatible with the language used by the state radio and television. Second comes the judiciary as the front line of confrontation with the press. They can take you to court and ban you. And then, it's the clergy. As the institution that supports the Islamic Republic, we cannot criticize the clergy.
TAGHI AMIRANI: They are confronting the reality of censorship in Iran, and also not constantly observing them. They're always pushing the red lines, always a little by little they're sort of breaking taboos and kind of pushing the barriers to see how far they can go without being shut down.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Shargh was shut down on the eve of the 2004 parliamentary election. They printed an open letter from the reformist members of Parliament to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini, criticizing the disqualification of more than 2000 reformist candidates.
TAGHI AMIRANI: Shargh and one other reformist newspaper dared to print part of this letter in the newspaper, and they were shut down the next day.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But unlike any of the other reformist papers that died and stayed dead after that, Shargh rose from the ashes, and mainly because they apologized. Here's the editor in chief. [MAN SPEAKING IN ARABIC]
INTERPRETER: The managing director had the courage to step on his honor and apologize. I think it was right to apologize. We were wrong to think that in our country the members of Parliament could write to the leader without getting a bad reaction. We should understand that criticizing the leader is not on. They should not have written the letter, and we should not have printed it.
TAGHI AMIRANI: The way it looks at its role is -- survival of a newspaper equals influence. If you're shut down, you lose your influence, you lose your relationship with your readers, and it's better to have that relationship and develop that relationship rather than print something that gets you into trouble -- maybe makes you the talk of the town -- maybe with a couple of journalists going to prison, they become heroes, they can be celebrated -- but what does that do for the continuation of your reform movement and the continuation of your journalism?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So politics is tightly controlled, but there seems to be a little more leeway in the beat the paper calls "social affairs." What is that?
TAGHI AMIRANI: Well, social affairs covers everything from education and health and employment issues, cultural issues, crime, drug addiction. This is the, the approach that Shargh journalists have chosen for themselves. They, they feel that in the tightly controlled political arena where there isn't much leeway for criticism or even an engagement, they should maybe shift the battle for reform to the social affairs arena, where they have a more open hand, and in a way, build reform from grassroots up.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So to get back to my intro-- the reform movement, as it was a few years ago may be dead, but a new and perhaps different reform movement is alive and kicking?
TAGHI AMIRANI: Yes. It's a new, more considered and reflective reform movement. Many of the reformists are accused of wanting too much, too quickly and being far too demanding and confrontational, and the reform movement has now gone back into retreat; it's re-evaluating its techniques. And Shargh is an example of reformist press that's finding a new language and a new way of making changes and gradual changes from inside.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The staff at Shargh is very young. The average age is 25. That's the same age as the Islamic Revolution itself, and they seem deeply patriotic, they love their country. They see their job as trying to make it better. Don't they perhaps share some of the goals of the Islamic Revolution?
TAGHI AMIRANI: I don't think anybody condemns the Islamic Revolution as such. It's the consequences and it's the aftermath and what came after that they have problems with. They're interested in change. They're interested in reform. They're not interested in revolution. They're interested in evolution. And they want to change the system in a non-confrontational and peaceful way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think that a newspaper like Shargh can really make a difference?
TAGHI AMIRANI: Yes. And it has made a difference, and it is continuing to make a difference. It's reaching the, the right audience. It's reaching the young, and, and Iran has a huge young population, and these other people who have all been born after the revolution, and life under an Islamic regime is the only thing they know. And that's the same as the journalists who are working at Shargh, so that these are the same tribe so to speak.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, there was an odd sequence in your film where the editors are debating whether or not to put the death of Marlon Brando on the front page. They do, but that's a pretty cosmopolitan editorial decision for a newspaper that serves what we in the West would regard as a closed society.
TAGHI AMIRANI: Well, I think it's -- Iran is not as closed as we are led to believe. As a filmmaker who's lived in the West and have been obviously influenced by Western attitudes to my own country, I too thought, well, these people are going to be less informed, and I went with a sort of slightly superior attitude to - I know it all - I've been here - and-- I can teach them a few things. That was so not right. [LAUGHTER] These people can wipe the floor with me, and within a couple of days I was tamed. I'm very, very proud of these people. I'm very inspired by them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. TAGHI, thank you very much.
TAGHI AMIRANI: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: TAGHI Amirani's film Red Lines and Deadlines will air on PBS September 23rd. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, songs to shop by, and the death of the single.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Peace talks among the various warring factions and the Sudanese government collapsed Wednesday, so the wave of mayhem, murder and disease that is killing an estimated 6 to 10,000 people a month in the Western region of Darfur will most likely roll on and on. And who's to blame? Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail points his finger at a man who wasn't there -- U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. Last week, Powell invoked the word "genocide" to describe what's happening in Darfur, thereby encouraging the rebels, says Ismail, to show more fanaticism and stubbornness. As is usual in such cases, the world press was late to the front pages on this story. Here to tell us why is Kenneth Bacon, president of Refugees International. Ken, welcome to On the Media.
KENNETH BACON: Glad to be here.
BOB GARFIELD: First of all, Secretary Powell recently used the word genocide in his testimony about Darfur before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That is not a word that generally springs easily from an American official's lips. What's the significance?
KENNETH BACON: The fact that Powell has called it genocide is important, because I think it removes a barrier that we've observed since World War II where government officials have been reluctant to use, understandably, reluctant to use the term genocide. So he's used the term, and now the question is - what do you do? Does it make sense to sit by and watch genocide happen? That's where we are now.
BOB GARFIELD: The coverage until very recently has been quite sparse on the human catastrophe in Darfur. Has the world been sitting on its hands because it, it simply didn't know about this story - because the media have fallen down on the job?
KENNETH BACON: The government of Sudan worked very hard to suppress coverage, to keep reporters out. They also understood that television coverage could be very damaging to them, and they worked particularly hard to keep TV crews out. It's interesting to note that the first international TV coverage of the death and displacement in Darfur appeared on Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel, in December of 2003. The government of Sudan closed their bureau in Khartoum, confiscated all their equipment, and jailed the correspondent.
BOB GARFIELD: You have a piece in the current Columbia Journalism Review where you're going step by step through the various tactics that the Sudanese government uses. Tell me what the government is doing specifically to physically keep reporters away from Darfur.
KENNETH BACON: Well, it can be difficult to get visas to visit Sudan, and once you get the visa to go to the capital of Khartoum, you have to receive permission to travel into Darfur. Emily Wax, of the Washington Post, waited for over a month and, in fact, never got it. She waited so long that she took an apartment in Khartoum. She finally got in with some high level visitors, including the French foreign minister and Kofi Annan and was able to write some really striking stories. Second, once you get official permission to go into Darfur, when you get there, you need additional permission from the security forces to go out and look around, and they assign you a monitor or a minder who ends up taking you to the places the government wants you to see, and preventing you from going to some places that you might want to see on your own.
BOB GARFIELD: A decade ago, we were watching this very similar situation play out in Rwanda amid enormous amount of coverage in the Western media. The situation in Sudan has resulted in less coverage to date. Had the media been unrestricted there and with cameras rolling and the evening news showing all of the grim reality, do you suppose it would have made a difference?
KENNETH BACON: I think it would have made a difference. I think the CNN effect is, in fact, real, and that when people see atrocities on TV, they react to them. One example of that is the, the scenes of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison. It was the visuals that, that really infuriated people, that made them realize how outrageous this behavior was, and had they been able to see pictures of mass graves, of men and boys gunned down, of women who had been raped, I think they would have reacted much more quickly than they have. In the case of Darfur, some of the earliest reports about what was going on in the United States came on radio. These were, in fact, detailed and very important reports, but even a really graphic radio report doesn't have the same impact that pictures have.
BOB GARFIELD: All, right, Ken. Well, thank you very much.
KENNETH BACON: Sure.
BOB GARFIELD: Former Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon is president of Refugees International. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Here's a song you've heard about 10,000 times: [START TAPE]
BEACH BOYS: WELL, SHE GOT HER DADDY'S CAR, AND SHE CRUISED TO THE HAMBURGER STAND NOW. SEEMS SHE FORGOT ALL ABOUT THE LIBRARY LIKE SHE TOLD HER OLD MAN NOW. AND WITH THE RADIO BLASTIN' GOES CRUISING JUST AS FAST AS SHE CAN, NOW. AND SHE'LL HAVE FUN, FUN, FUN TILL HER DADDY TAKES THE T-BIRD AWAY-- --FUN, FUN, FUN TILL HER DADDY TAKES THE T-BIRD AWAY. [END TAPE]
BOB GARFIELD: When the Beach Boys recorded that ditty, it was a love song for the Thunderbird -- not a financial arrangement with the Ford Motor Company. But, as someone else once recorded -- The times, they are a-changin'. When Run DMC released My Adidas in 1986, the shoe company offered the rap group a formal 1.5 million dollar endorsement deal, marking maybe the last time the horse was pulling the cart. Recently, General Motors paid rapper Ms. Jade 300,000 dollars to put two Hummers in a music video, and other advertisers are paying musicians and record labels to include brand names in song lyrics. T.L. Stanley has covered this new era of pop music product placement for Advertising Age --the greatest trade magazine in the world --(where I also work). Terry, welcome to On the Media.
T.L. STANLEY: Hey, how are you?
BOB GARFIELD: I'm well, thank you. Product placements in movies have gone on for decades. TV seems to be trusting its entire future to the intersection of Madison and Vine. Should we be surprised that the music industry is trying to ride the same gravy train?
T.L. STANLEY: Absolutely not, because the music business is struggling. It is only natural at this point for you as an artist to look to a deep pockets advertiser for the kind of -- not just payout, but the kind of exposure and marketing dollars that you can gain by making an alliance with a marketer.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, as I mentioned, Ms. Jade was paid a tidy sum to put a Hummer in her music video. Would that be a creative stretch, or would the insertion of, of-- the Hummer be a relatively painless process?
T.L. STANLEY: Cars and booze are the most prevalent things in hip hop videos. So there's going to be a vehicle in that video, [MS. JADE SONG UNDER] and if someone wants to pay her to drive a Hummer instead of an Escalade, fine. [MS. JADE SONG UP FULL, THEN FADES] I mean, we are in a situation a little bit where the, the tail is wagging the dog --where some label would say -- particularly with an up and coming artist -- this artist has written a song, and it mentions this brand of alcohol - so let's go talk to that brand of alcohol, and see if they want to be involved. Do they want to sponsor this, this person's tour? Do they want to do some marketing? Because it could just as easily be another brand, and we'll go and talk to them.
BOB GARFIELD: When product placements in films were overdone, there was an audience backlash, and I expect to very soon see the same thing with these clumsy TV plugs that are everywhere. But is there something about youthful music audiences, especially hip hop, that so embraces the brand culture that there's no risk of turning off the listener? I mean Busta Rhymes writing Pass the Courvoisier, Part II hasn't seemed to infuriate anyone, you know, except possibly Hennessy and Martel.
T.L. STANLEY: Right. That hip hop audience is very brand-aware, but if someone starts rapping about household cleaning products, then-- [LAUGHTER] that will be a problem.
BOB GARFIELD: I just want to ask you about music videos. More and more you're seeing products actually pop up in those. Doesn't that cause a problem for MTV, for example? Don't those exposures -potentially irritate the advertisers on MTV who may be selling a competing product?
T.L. STANLEY: I'm not sure if their policy is really set in stone these days. Now, back in the day, you know, when MTV was younger, really the only thing they used to have to worry about pixilating out were pot leaves all over people's shirts and their hats, but now they do that for brands. If it's a big logo on someone's shirt, perhaps that'll be blurred out. But it's so prevalent that you couldn't possibly pixilate out every brand reference in a music video. That's all you would notice.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, we've come now to the last question, and I almost hesitate to ask it, but I'm going to anyway. This rash of product placements -- doesn't it compromise the art of popular music?
T.L. STANLEY: I think that depends on what kind of music you're talking about, how the reference is made. Hip hop is all about bling. It's about talking about what you have, showing off the spoils of your wealth, so you're wearing Prada, you're wearing Gucci, you're drinking Cristal-- it's-- very much accepted that it will be littered with brands. It's a different matter, of course, if you are a band like Radiohead. Just ain't gonna happen.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, Terry. Well, listen, thank you very much.
T.L. STANLEY: Absolutely. Good talking to you, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: T.L. Stanley covers entertainment for my favorite magazine, Advertising Age. [MS. JADE SONG UP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: There was a time when independent music producers of modest means could spend a few hundred bucks on a single and talk a programmer into some local radio air play. In fact, nearly half the chart-topping hits of rock & roll's golden age came from those independents, and all their hopes were pinned to those little records with the big holes --the 45 rpm single. On the Media's Rex Doane reports on: Where have all those singles gone?
REX DOANE: The 45 had been introduced as early as 1948, but it was the convergence of this emerging technology with the burgeoning youth culture that set off the explosion. Gene Sculatti has written about pop music for over 35 years and currently serves as the director of special issues for Billboard Magazine.
GENE SCULATTI: The 45 is just inextricably bound up with that whole-- late '50s through pretty much middle '60s period of popular music. I mean it's -it's the standard, and it's the-- it's the platter on which the meal arrives. I mean there's no -- there's almost no distinction between the content of what's on there and the format in which it's delivered. [JOHNNY ACE'S PLEDGING MY LOVE PLAYS]
REX DOANE: Jim Dawson is the co-author of the book What Was the First Rock & Roll Record?, and for Dawson Johnny Ace's Pledging My Love from 1955 signaled the true coming of age for the 45. [JOHNNY ACE'S PLEDGING MY LOVE UP AND UNDER]
JOHNNY ACE: FOREVER MY DARLING MY LOVE WILL BE TRUE ALWAYS AND FOREVER....
JIM DAWSON: That record which was a huge hit. Actually sold more 45 records than it sold 78's and showed that the young people had embraced the 45.
REX DOANE: Billboard's Gene Sculatti notes that long before the onslaught of music videos and the seeming endless parade of pop star pictorials and slick magazines, the 45 represented the only tangible link between artist and fan.
GENE SCULATTI: The names of these acts and the names of the songs and the labels -- there's all this iconography that's all that's available. It, it sort of adds to the mystery of the experience. You know what I mean?
REX DOANE: Consider, too, the ritual involved in playing a 45. Pop in a CD, and you can go fold laundry. But to play a 45, you must make a special commitment. Place the record on the turntable; lower the needle; and stay and listen until the music runs out. It's an archaic process that places special emphasis on that song for that moment -- a solitary throne for a favorite artist and a favorite tune. [45 RECORD BEGINS PLAYING -- WITH STATIC]
LITTLE RICHARD: OH MY SOUL-- BABE, BABE, BABE, BABY-- DON'T YOU KNOW MY LOVE IS TRUE WOOOOOO! OH HONEY, HONEY, HONEY, HONEY, HONEY-- GET UP OFF OF THAT MONEY LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE--
REX DOANE: To be sure, 45 collectors seem alarmingly fetishistic about such matters. They speak of label variations, B side oddities and the hopelessly obscure. It is an affliction, at times, only understood by the afflicted.
DICK BLACKBURN: If you've got a child who exhibits signs of complete vinyl mania, then you might send him to a 12-Step right away or, failing that, some sort of conditioning therapy.
REX DOANE: Dick Blackburn is a long-time 45 collector, currently working on a novel about his passion.
DICK BLACKBURN: I got into 45's because every time you put a needle on a new one, no matter which one you're trying to listen to, it's always the potential that you're going to get a mule's kick between the eyes of originality, eccentricity and genius. [TAPE UP]
LITTLE RICHARD: OH! MY SOUL....!! [END TAPE]
REX DOANE: While 45 collectors like Blackburn spend years picking through the bones -- those discarded disks from decades ago -- the record industry has responded with what one might term mild indifference. In the late 1980s, when 45's were abruptly ushered out of the stores along with the vinyl LP, to make way for compact disks, major labels feebly offered cassingles and CD singles for customers who wanted a song instead of an album. The cassingle quickly flopped, and the CD single has been steadily fading. In recent years tiny low budget labels have filled the void by pressing select oldies on 45 for juke box owners and operators to spin, and die hard collectors can turn to labels like the Brooklyn-based Norton Records whose passion for the format far exceeds minor concerns like making money.
BILLY MILLER: To me that's the number one format.
REX DOANE: Label co-founder Billy Miller. [CLASSIC EARLY R&R INSTRUMENTAL UP AND UNDER]
BILLY MILLER: You know, when you bottom line the profits, there is no profit in making 45's, so you have to just keep the momentum going and keep putting it out and hope you don't wake up and come to your senses.
REX DOANE: Even the fad interest in old records spurred on by club and hip hop deejays have largely passed the 45 by. Their interest in vinyl is strictly limited to LP's and 12 inch singles. And so the 45 rpm record now spends its twilight years in collectors' magazines, flea markets and garage sales. Inevitably, CD's too will be forced into an extinction of their own by some new technology, but as long as the Baby Boom endures, the unassuming 45 will retain a resonance that transcends the music caught in the grooves. [INSTRUMENTAL SWEETLY WAILS TO A CLOSE, THEN SOUND OF TURNTABLE TURNING] For On the Media in New York, I'm Rex Doane. [TURNTABLE SOUND FADES, THEME MUSIC COMES UP]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, and Mike Vuolo, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Anne Kosseff. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts and MP3 downloads at onthemedia.org, and email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media, from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC TAG]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The investigation reported by Dan Rather on 60 Minutes II earlier this month was indicting, to say the least. Based on taped interviews, Pentagon records and newly surfaced documents, CBS concluded that President Bush had not only benefitted from political connections to get into the Texas National Guard in the midst of the Vietnam War, but failed to meet his Guard commitments and ignored direct orders to do so. The smoking gun: copies of memos from Bush's commanding officer complaining of political pressure to go easy on the son of a Republican big shot.
BOB GARFIELD: Three decades later, this may or may not deserve to be a big campaign issue. With a bloody war currently raging and vast social and economic problems to deal with, maybe the events of 1972 don't much matter. But truth always matters, and the CBS investigation, following similar revelations by the Boston Globe, the Associated Press and U.S. News & World Report, paint an unflattering portrait: a candidate for presidential re-election who -- when his country first called -- abused political privilege and his comrades' trust, and has been hushing up the facts ever since. And it took only one day for all hell to break loose -- not putting the president on the defensive, but rather Rather. The poster child for liberal media bias had to deal with the very plausible accusation that the smoking-gun memos were fakes. [START TAPE]
DAN RATHER: Are those documents authentic, as experts consulted by CBS news continue to maintain? Or were they forgeries or re-creations...? We will keep an open mind, and we will continue to report credible evidence and responsible points of view as we try to answer the questions raised about the authenticity of the documents. [END TAPE]
BOB GARFIELD: That was Rather on Wednesday, only two days after categorically vouching for the memos on the CBS Evening News. As of Friday, the authenticity question had yet to be definitively answered. What was most definitively answered was how a journalistic bombshell can get defused.
BRANT HOUSTON: At this point, I believe that that is overshadowing the rest of the story....
BOB GARFIELD: Brant Houston, professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, is executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc.
BRANT HOUSTON: It is a nightmare, I think, for somebody that's worked on an investigative story with integrity and with persistence, to have something like this happen, it really is.
BOB GARFIELD: He's speaking of CBS News, if it was in fact duped by forgeries. But there is also the question of the other news organizations whose investigations have drawn identical conclusions based on hundreds of interviews and official Pentagon records. The September 8th Boston Globe piece, for instance, demonstrated that young Lt. George Bush twice signed pledges to fulfill his service requirements on the penalty of being called to active duty, yet never met his commitments. But here is what the head of the Globe investigative team, Walter Robinson, heard in the very first question of his interview on the NPR talk program The Connection: [START TAPE]
DICK GORDON: Last week, you and Associated Press, CBS -- you were all over these new documents, and then a weekend of questions about their authenticity - and I'm not sure where we are right now. Where are we?
WALTER ROBINSON: Well, I just, I want to make an important distinction. The documents that we and the Associated Press reported on are the official military records of President Bush.
DICK GORDON: Okay?
WALTER ROBINSON: The documents which CBS was trying to... [END TAPE]
BOB GARFIELD: For Robinson, the implications of this confusion were all too clear.
WALTER ROBINSON: Well, I was thinking if the host of The Connection has managed to morph all of the reports about Bush's military service into one that is dominated by the issue -- "Are all these documents authentic?" -- how is it possible for the average voter to make any sense out of this?
BOB GARFIELD: What's the answer to that question?
WALTER ROBINSON: Well, the answer is: for most voters, probably not much chance at all right now.
BOB GARFIELD: Especially when the Fox News channel labels the controversy "Rathergate" and rhetoric from Republican leaders implies that the suspect memos were forged by the John Kerry campaign to discredit the president. Of course, there have also been raised eyebrows among Bush haters, who noticed how rapidly the White House distributed the disputed memos to reporters, and how even more rapidly bloggers materialized to impeach their authenticity. Watergate figure John Dean, who's confessional testimony finally sank his boss, Richard Nixon, is no stranger to political dirty tricks.
JOHN DEAN: I'm one who happens to believe that there are Karl Rove sleeper cells that need very little instruction to, to thrust themself into action.
BOB GARFIELD: In any event, he says, for the clouds hovering over the president's service record to be blown away by a tempest about liberal bias in the media was a political windfall for the Bush-Cheney campaign.
JOHN DEAN: This goes back to Bush I, and it goes back to, even to Watergate and Dan Rather and beating up on Republicans. So it-- obviously [LAUGHS] - this is the Perfect Storm for this situation.
BOB GARFIELD: For his part, the Globe's Robinson is fairly philosophical about what he calls the "story du jour."
WALTER ROBINSON: Well, I, I think at the moment, the bigger story is clearly -- was CBS the victim of what would be, in recent American political history, a fairly extraordinary hoax. I mean we play a substantial role in the political process -- we in the media -- and if such a large news organization on an issue of such importance -- the president's integrity --gets duped, then that's a story.
BOB GARFIELD: But evidence of military dereliction by a future war president is also news. And Robinson worries that--
WALTER ROBINSON: Facts for Bush's own records about his lack of fidelity to his Guard service seemed to have escaped public notice because of skepticism about one news organization's reporting on them.
BOB GARFIELD: In those worries, he is not alone. As more and more attention is paid to the disputed memos at the expense of the underlying story, the liberal media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Media has looked at Rathergate and seen not just another three-ring media circus, but a badly managed one. It's the equivalent, Fair observes, of covering the sideshow and ignoring the center ring. [MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The now long-running investigation into which senior administration official leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame grinds on. This week, Time magazine's Matt Cooper was served with another subpoena, and so was Judith Miller of the New York Times. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus managed to avoid one, because his source identified himself to prosecutors. Earlier this month, Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, publicly came forth saying he had spoken to reporters but not revealed the agent's name. Of course, the only reporter to actually use the information was columnist Bob Novak, and if he felt any moral or professional obligation to name his source, he probably couldn't have run with the leak, but he could, and did, attributing it by journalistic tradition to a couple of (quote) "senior administration officials." That's a phrase applicable to just about anyone above a certain government pay grade. How can we figure out which senior administration official is which? Harry Jaffe, national editor at Washingtonian magazine, recently penned a field guide to the senior administration official -- in Washington parlance, the SAO. Harry, welcome to the show.
HARRY JAFFE: I'm pleased to be with you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So let's go through some of the tips you offer readers in your guide. If the quote, say, concerns the Middle East, who's likely to be the SAO?
HARRY JAFFE: If it's the Middle East, I would say Elliott Abrams.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what if it's about Europe?
HARRY JAFFE: The European specialist is Dan Fried.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And how about economic affairs?
HARRY JAFFE: Ah, this is a sticky wicket here. It used to be that the most talkative one was Greg Mankiw. He's the president's chief economist. He's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. Then he made a comment that you might recall about the fact that outsourcing jobs was good for the economy. We haven't heard very much from him-- [LAUGHTER] recently. Good chance it's Rob Nichols, who is the chief spokesman for the Treasury Department.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, the reporter could make this whole process a little more transparent by offering those locational guides -- for instance, State Department official, Defense Department official, and so forth. But usually, the laws of Washington journalism prevent that, don't they?
HARRY JAFFE: Well, a deal is cut every time there is an interview. The terms of engagement -- whether it is off the record - on background - on deep background - not for attribution -- these are part of the negotiations of almost any interview in this town.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so if they don't say State Department, it means that the reporter was told - you just have to attribute this to the administration in its vastness.
HARRY JAFFE: Well, I can tell you that every journalist starts with the desire to quote the person by name. It may be hard to grasp, but we journalists actually do like to serve readers, and readers, we know, want to know who the actual person was behind a quote. So we begin by saying can we quote you "Greg Mankiw" and he says - no. Then how can we quote you? Can I quote you as an economic advisor? No. [LAUGHTER] Can I quote you as someone who is a top official of the Treasury Department? No. How about a senior administration official? Okay. [LAUGHTER] So it's a slippery slope down to a guy walking down the street who happened to take an economics course in college.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right. So, Harry the most inflammatory use of the SAO in recent times was in the aforementioned Bob Novak column -- his highly-placed senior administration official revealed the identity of then-CIA agent Valerie Plame. What can you deduce about that unnamed source, using your guide?
HARRY JAFFE: Well, I would think that the principal suspect here is Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Cheney's shop has the reputation of being more politically-attuned and also a little bit more of a bunch of knife-fighters. I mean, look -- the other name that was on the tips of everybody's tongues in Washington was Karl Rove. This clearly became a very important political matter.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And the release of Valerie Plame's name would be seen as a political move, because her husband, Joseph Wilson, had written in the New York Times that Iraq had not sought uranium from Niger, as the government had contended.
HARRY JAFFE: Joe Wilson became an enemy. Let's use Novak to discredit Joe Wilson. But your question is, and our unanswered question is, and the prosecutor would like to know -- who was that SAO?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Would you like to see the abolition of the phrase "senior administration official" from all newspapers?
HARRY JAFFE: Absolutely. I think that there should be names behind quotes, as much as possible. Let's at least say that this is a high-ranking official -- give us a department at least. National Security Council. You know, Council of Economic Advisors. I think the question becomes, you know, does it really help the reader to know who is the author of a particular quote. I think yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And the likelihood of the disappearance of the SAO from newspapers?
HARRY JAFFE: Well, I actually think that it may be a glacial change, but I think if there is pressure on newspaper reporters from inside and from readers, and I think that while it may not happen next week or certainly before this next election, I think that in the future we're going to see better identification of sources.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Thank you very much.
HARRY JAFFE: Appreciate being with you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Harry Jaffe is the national editor at the Washingtonian.
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps complains about terrible judgment -- at the FCC, and Candidate Kerry clams up.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. We in the media have loudly complained about the relative lack of access granted by President Bush. Over the past three and a half years he has given a mere 15 solo press conferences -- the least of any president in 50 years. By way of contrast, a President Kerry would grant one press conference per month -- or so he promised at a campaign stop in Wisconsin on August 3rd. But it turns out that Candidate Kerry is not quite so generous with his time. He last made himself available to traveling reporters who sit just a few yards away in the back of his campaign plane on August 9th. Here to talk about this recent brownout by the Kerry campaign is Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi. Paul, welcome back to the show.
PAUL FARHI: Thanks, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you've taken three trips on the Kerry campaign plane since he was nominated. Is this a sudden change in access?
PAUL FARHI: It's been gradual. We're now in a new phase, obviously. It's less than two months before the election, and the stakes are incredibly high, and the campaign, I think, is taking no chances. They feel that if they gave unlimited access or even partial access to Kerry, that the chances for, one, a slipup or two, for Kerry stepping on his daily message of the day would be high.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That is a legitimate concern though, isn't it? Either slipping up or changing the focus --it's happened.
PAUL FARHI: Yes. Back in August 3rd, he gave a brief interview to the press pool, and he was asked whether he had any regrets about his vote on the Iraq war resolution, and he said in effect, no - no regrets. And of course he has since been put on the defensive about that statement and has had to explain and re-explain himself for the last month.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's often been noted that Al Gore actually alienated his press corps, and suffered thereby. Is the lack of accessibility in the Kerry campaign breeding resentment?
PAUL FARHI: Yes, I was in Cincinnati with him last week, and we were all fired up, because they passed the word that he was going to come out and make a statement, which suggested to us that he was also going to take questions. We were all arranged on the tarmac at the airport. He read a statement for about 26 seconds or so, and he turned his back and walked away, and-- it's moments like that that make you feel like a campaign stenographer rather than a campaign reporter -- we are being fed what the campaign wants us to have and not, obviously, what we'd like to know about. And-- you could hear, literally, people fuming about - and [LAUGHTER] see people fuming about the way we were treated at that moment.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think this media strategy is working or working against him?
PAUL FARHI: In their own narrow way, it is working. What they want to do is have a message that they have crafted and have that as the only message that gets out. In Kerry's case, he's basically saying - and in Bush's case as well - they're basically saying - here is your news and here is your only news - and that's what we want you to write about. And to the extent that we can't ask them the other questions, we only have a very few options about what the story of the day is going to be -- and it turns out that it's the story they want us to have.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But what do you think this suggests about Kerry's campaign promise to make himself available every month as president if he's not willing to do that as a candidate?
PAUL FARHI: The campaign aides were telling me that this only applies to when he's president. It doesn't apply [LAUGHTER] to when he's on the campaign trail. So, take your pick.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, as you said in your article in the Washington Post, which is why we called you up, he makes himself available to regional reporters, especially in swing states; he'll go on Don Imus. He just tends to shirk his responsibilities to the boys and girls at the back of the bus.
PAUL FARHI: When you sit down with a publication or a news outlet, you probably have prepared certain points you want to make. It is only the illusion of spontaneity, really, that you're giving in those sessions. Whereas on the campaign trail, you open yourself up to considerable risk if you step in front of the microphones and take it from all sides.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about the vice presidential candidate, John Edwards?
PAUL FARHI: He seems to be a little bit better, but not really too much better. I covered Edwards back when he was still alive in the primaries, and he did have a, a certain accessibility, and he did try a little bit harder to make himself available. Now I think he's sort of getting the message from the Kerry handlers that that's not the way we do things around here, and he's cut back somewhat.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's compare now Kerry-Edwards with Bush-Cheney. Back in 2000, we saw that documentary by Alexandra Pelosi, and we saw Candidate Bush getting very chummy with campaign reporters. How about this time around?
PAUL FARHI: Not at all. His contact with the press, even in those informal kinds of ways, has become extremely limited. Back in 2000, he had a lot of get-to-know-you sessions with the reporters. He gave them nicknames. Now, of course he's president, the circumstances have changed, and the reporters on his campaign plane - on Air Force One -don't get to see him much at all.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you know, we have heard that John Edwards is sort of the charming side of the John Kerry campaign, and I think it's safe to say that Dick Cheney does that for Bush, right? [LAUGHTER]
PAUL FARHI: No comment. Cheney's even worse than Bush. Cheney is by far the least accessible and most difficult to deal with.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, Paul, thank you very much.
PAUL FARHI: Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Paul Farhi is on the campaign trail for the Washington Post. [MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This week, dissident FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein held one of their trademark town meetings in Dearborn, Michigan. Appealing to the public over the head of FCC Chairman Michael Powell, they always ask roughly the same question: Do you like how the airwaves are being used? Mr. Copps, for one, emphatically does not. As the Republicans gathered last month in Madison Square Garden, Copps decried the networks' skimpy coverage in the New York Times, and while condemning the general state of broadcast TV, he heartily bit the hand that feeds him. Could you read that part, Commissioner?
MICHAEL COPPS: I'll be happy to. [READING] The FCC is doing nothing to help, as the situation deteriorates. It has weakened almost every explicit duty stations once had for serving the public interest - like ensuring that stations cover local issues and offer viewers a diversity of opinion. Just as bad, the Commission eliminated protections against media consolidation last year, even though critics warned that this would result in even less local coverage. Luckily, a federal court rejected this decision, so we have another chance to save these rules.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You noted that the courts rejected the FCC's reasons for lifting some of the remaining restrictions on media ownership. Where does that issue stand now?
MICHAEL COPPS: Excellent question. On June 2003, the Commission passed these rules, greatly loosening the ownership caps. Since that time, the American people, the Congress and the Courts have gone on record saying the FCC has made a mistake. The United States Senate voted to overturn the entire decision. Has since voted again to do that. Went to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals said the reasoning that you gave us for these rules is substantively flawed. Do it over. So that's the good news. Now, the bad news is -- where do they send these rules back to? They send 'em back to the very same Commission that dreamed them up in the first place, and herein is the challenge -- because big media doesn't cover this issue and tell the American people what the state of play is, a lot of folks will read a story about -- the Senate voted today to overturn the rules and think - oh, boy - the forces of justice and right prevail -- or the court sent them back. Whoopee. In reality, we're right back where we started.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: One of your principal beefs with media consolidation is that you believe it reduces the coverage of local issues. Do you have any data to back up your position?
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, I think there's all kinds of data. We know that in the 2002 so-called "off-year" elections, over half the newscasts had no mention whatsoever of the congressional and local races. We know that political ads probably outweigh political stories by about 4 to 1, too. But I can just tell you time and again -- I remember being out in Phoenix at a, a hearing about a year ago and the mayor or the former mayor was talking about when he went there, and they had media diversity and lots of stations and newspapers. He said people used to just -- in fact, they opened the door to go out and get a bottle of water or take a rest break or something one day, and about three reporters fell through the door, because they were lined up to find out what was going inside. Now that city has a very consolidated media environment, and he says you can't get anybody to come out and cover these events.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, the networks' shrinking convention coverage sparked your op-ed piece, but the public did have ample opportunity to see the convention -- even the 17 percent that don't have cable or satellite could have tuned in to PBS -- but they didn't. Are you saying that the networks should provide this coverage even if the public has amply demonstrated that it doesn't really care?
MICHAEL COPPS: I don't think the public has amply demonstrated that, and I don't know how networks are in a position to say that they have. You know, we don't even require, any more, broadcasters to go out and do what used to be called "ascertainment" and finding out what people really want to hear and what people think needs to be on. So this is - this is yes, oh, we're giving the people what they want to hear. That's within a very narrow parameter. They're giving the people what they want to hear -- that-will-make-money-for-them on the niche groups that they're targeting.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is it perhaps just too late in the day for the networks to sort of cycle back and start offering the hours to civic duty type coverage that you would want them to?
MICHAEL COPPS: Absolutely not. My little op-ed piece focused on the convention because that was the news du jour. But this is ongoing. It has to do with the entire democratic dialogue. It has to do with local races as well as national races. I would love to see them step up to the plate and say, boy, we're really in an important time here with the war, the health care crisis, education, all these things-- to cover it. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You would love to [LAUGHTER] that and a quarter won't even get you a cup of coffee in New York.
MICHAEL COPPS: [LAUGHS] No, but that and public pressure might just get it done.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thanks very much.
MICHAEL COPPS: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michael Copps is a Democratic Commissioner of the FCC. [MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: First, some quick history. For most of the 25 years since the Islamic Revolution, Iranians have lived under the strict moral and religious guidelines imposed by the un-elected conservative clerics. But in the aftermath of the devastating Iran-Iraq war, a disillusioned populace swept the reformist candidate Mohammed Khatami into the presidency. His liberal agenda promised a new era of freedom that everyone, especially the press, had been yearning for. The clerics, of course, fought back --imprisoning democratic leaders and murdering writers, artists and intellectuals, silencing students and closing newspapers. In the last parliamentary elections, voter turnout was abysmal, because the clerics had disqualified more than half of the reformist candidates. As a result, conservatives recaptured Parliament for the first time in a decade, and throughout the world, the reform movement in Iran was declared dead. And yet, a new film suggests that that announcement may be premature. Taghi Amirani is an Iranian born director who's lived in London since 1975. His documentary Red Lines and Deadlines portrays daily life at one of Iran's few remaining reform newspapers. Shargh is just a year old, but it has already learned to walk Iran's perilous political tightrope. Taghi, welcome to the show.
TAGHI AMIRANI: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It seems the reform press has to execute a very graceful dance to negotiate these strict but ill-defined laws of censorship known as "the red lines." [WOMAN SPEAKING IN ARABIC]
INTERPRETER: The first red line in our country is the leadership. This is Shargh's most important red line. Not only do we refrain from criticizing him, but we also try to ensure that our reporting is appropriate and our writing style is compatible with the language used by the state radio and television. Second comes the judiciary as the front line of confrontation with the press. They can take you to court and ban you. And then, it's the clergy. As the institution that supports the Islamic Republic, we cannot criticize the clergy.
TAGHI AMIRANI: They are confronting the reality of censorship in Iran, and also not constantly observing them. They're always pushing the red lines, always a little by little they're sort of breaking taboos and kind of pushing the barriers to see how far they can go without being shut down.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Shargh was shut down on the eve of the 2004 parliamentary election. They printed an open letter from the reformist members of Parliament to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini, criticizing the disqualification of more than 2000 reformist candidates.
TAGHI AMIRANI: Shargh and one other reformist newspaper dared to print part of this letter in the newspaper, and they were shut down the next day.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But unlike any of the other reformist papers that died and stayed dead after that, Shargh rose from the ashes, and mainly because they apologized. Here's the editor in chief. [MAN SPEAKING IN ARABIC]
INTERPRETER: The managing director had the courage to step on his honor and apologize. I think it was right to apologize. We were wrong to think that in our country the members of Parliament could write to the leader without getting a bad reaction. We should understand that criticizing the leader is not on. They should not have written the letter, and we should not have printed it.
TAGHI AMIRANI: The way it looks at its role is -- survival of a newspaper equals influence. If you're shut down, you lose your influence, you lose your relationship with your readers, and it's better to have that relationship and develop that relationship rather than print something that gets you into trouble -- maybe makes you the talk of the town -- maybe with a couple of journalists going to prison, they become heroes, they can be celebrated -- but what does that do for the continuation of your reform movement and the continuation of your journalism?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So politics is tightly controlled, but there seems to be a little more leeway in the beat the paper calls "social affairs." What is that?
TAGHI AMIRANI: Well, social affairs covers everything from education and health and employment issues, cultural issues, crime, drug addiction. This is the, the approach that Shargh journalists have chosen for themselves. They, they feel that in the tightly controlled political arena where there isn't much leeway for criticism or even an engagement, they should maybe shift the battle for reform to the social affairs arena, where they have a more open hand, and in a way, build reform from grassroots up.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So to get back to my intro-- the reform movement, as it was a few years ago may be dead, but a new and perhaps different reform movement is alive and kicking?
TAGHI AMIRANI: Yes. It's a new, more considered and reflective reform movement. Many of the reformists are accused of wanting too much, too quickly and being far too demanding and confrontational, and the reform movement has now gone back into retreat; it's re-evaluating its techniques. And Shargh is an example of reformist press that's finding a new language and a new way of making changes and gradual changes from inside.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The staff at Shargh is very young. The average age is 25. That's the same age as the Islamic Revolution itself, and they seem deeply patriotic, they love their country. They see their job as trying to make it better. Don't they perhaps share some of the goals of the Islamic Revolution?
TAGHI AMIRANI: I don't think anybody condemns the Islamic Revolution as such. It's the consequences and it's the aftermath and what came after that they have problems with. They're interested in change. They're interested in reform. They're not interested in revolution. They're interested in evolution. And they want to change the system in a non-confrontational and peaceful way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think that a newspaper like Shargh can really make a difference?
TAGHI AMIRANI: Yes. And it has made a difference, and it is continuing to make a difference. It's reaching the, the right audience. It's reaching the young, and, and Iran has a huge young population, and these other people who have all been born after the revolution, and life under an Islamic regime is the only thing they know. And that's the same as the journalists who are working at Shargh, so that these are the same tribe so to speak.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, there was an odd sequence in your film where the editors are debating whether or not to put the death of Marlon Brando on the front page. They do, but that's a pretty cosmopolitan editorial decision for a newspaper that serves what we in the West would regard as a closed society.
TAGHI AMIRANI: Well, I think it's -- Iran is not as closed as we are led to believe. As a filmmaker who's lived in the West and have been obviously influenced by Western attitudes to my own country, I too thought, well, these people are going to be less informed, and I went with a sort of slightly superior attitude to - I know it all - I've been here - and-- I can teach them a few things. That was so not right. [LAUGHTER] These people can wipe the floor with me, and within a couple of days I was tamed. I'm very, very proud of these people. I'm very inspired by them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. TAGHI, thank you very much.
TAGHI AMIRANI: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: TAGHI Amirani's film Red Lines and Deadlines will air on PBS September 23rd. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, songs to shop by, and the death of the single.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Peace talks among the various warring factions and the Sudanese government collapsed Wednesday, so the wave of mayhem, murder and disease that is killing an estimated 6 to 10,000 people a month in the Western region of Darfur will most likely roll on and on. And who's to blame? Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail points his finger at a man who wasn't there -- U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. Last week, Powell invoked the word "genocide" to describe what's happening in Darfur, thereby encouraging the rebels, says Ismail, to show more fanaticism and stubbornness. As is usual in such cases, the world press was late to the front pages on this story. Here to tell us why is Kenneth Bacon, president of Refugees International. Ken, welcome to On the Media.
KENNETH BACON: Glad to be here.
BOB GARFIELD: First of all, Secretary Powell recently used the word genocide in his testimony about Darfur before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That is not a word that generally springs easily from an American official's lips. What's the significance?
KENNETH BACON: The fact that Powell has called it genocide is important, because I think it removes a barrier that we've observed since World War II where government officials have been reluctant to use, understandably, reluctant to use the term genocide. So he's used the term, and now the question is - what do you do? Does it make sense to sit by and watch genocide happen? That's where we are now.
BOB GARFIELD: The coverage until very recently has been quite sparse on the human catastrophe in Darfur. Has the world been sitting on its hands because it, it simply didn't know about this story - because the media have fallen down on the job?
KENNETH BACON: The government of Sudan worked very hard to suppress coverage, to keep reporters out. They also understood that television coverage could be very damaging to them, and they worked particularly hard to keep TV crews out. It's interesting to note that the first international TV coverage of the death and displacement in Darfur appeared on Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel, in December of 2003. The government of Sudan closed their bureau in Khartoum, confiscated all their equipment, and jailed the correspondent.
BOB GARFIELD: You have a piece in the current Columbia Journalism Review where you're going step by step through the various tactics that the Sudanese government uses. Tell me what the government is doing specifically to physically keep reporters away from Darfur.
KENNETH BACON: Well, it can be difficult to get visas to visit Sudan, and once you get the visa to go to the capital of Khartoum, you have to receive permission to travel into Darfur. Emily Wax, of the Washington Post, waited for over a month and, in fact, never got it. She waited so long that she took an apartment in Khartoum. She finally got in with some high level visitors, including the French foreign minister and Kofi Annan and was able to write some really striking stories. Second, once you get official permission to go into Darfur, when you get there, you need additional permission from the security forces to go out and look around, and they assign you a monitor or a minder who ends up taking you to the places the government wants you to see, and preventing you from going to some places that you might want to see on your own.
BOB GARFIELD: A decade ago, we were watching this very similar situation play out in Rwanda amid enormous amount of coverage in the Western media. The situation in Sudan has resulted in less coverage to date. Had the media been unrestricted there and with cameras rolling and the evening news showing all of the grim reality, do you suppose it would have made a difference?
KENNETH BACON: I think it would have made a difference. I think the CNN effect is, in fact, real, and that when people see atrocities on TV, they react to them. One example of that is the, the scenes of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison. It was the visuals that, that really infuriated people, that made them realize how outrageous this behavior was, and had they been able to see pictures of mass graves, of men and boys gunned down, of women who had been raped, I think they would have reacted much more quickly than they have. In the case of Darfur, some of the earliest reports about what was going on in the United States came on radio. These were, in fact, detailed and very important reports, but even a really graphic radio report doesn't have the same impact that pictures have.
BOB GARFIELD: All, right, Ken. Well, thank you very much.
KENNETH BACON: Sure.
BOB GARFIELD: Former Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon is president of Refugees International. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Here's a song you've heard about 10,000 times: [START TAPE]
BEACH BOYS: WELL, SHE GOT HER DADDY'S CAR, AND SHE CRUISED TO THE HAMBURGER STAND NOW. SEEMS SHE FORGOT ALL ABOUT THE LIBRARY LIKE SHE TOLD HER OLD MAN NOW. AND WITH THE RADIO BLASTIN' GOES CRUISING JUST AS FAST AS SHE CAN, NOW. AND SHE'LL HAVE FUN, FUN, FUN TILL HER DADDY TAKES THE T-BIRD AWAY-- --FUN, FUN, FUN TILL HER DADDY TAKES THE T-BIRD AWAY. [END TAPE]
BOB GARFIELD: When the Beach Boys recorded that ditty, it was a love song for the Thunderbird -- not a financial arrangement with the Ford Motor Company. But, as someone else once recorded -- The times, they are a-changin'. When Run DMC released My Adidas in 1986, the shoe company offered the rap group a formal 1.5 million dollar endorsement deal, marking maybe the last time the horse was pulling the cart. Recently, General Motors paid rapper Ms. Jade 300,000 dollars to put two Hummers in a music video, and other advertisers are paying musicians and record labels to include brand names in song lyrics. T.L. Stanley has covered this new era of pop music product placement for Advertising Age --the greatest trade magazine in the world --(where I also work). Terry, welcome to On the Media.
T.L. STANLEY: Hey, how are you?
BOB GARFIELD: I'm well, thank you. Product placements in movies have gone on for decades. TV seems to be trusting its entire future to the intersection of Madison and Vine. Should we be surprised that the music industry is trying to ride the same gravy train?
T.L. STANLEY: Absolutely not, because the music business is struggling. It is only natural at this point for you as an artist to look to a deep pockets advertiser for the kind of -- not just payout, but the kind of exposure and marketing dollars that you can gain by making an alliance with a marketer.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, as I mentioned, Ms. Jade was paid a tidy sum to put a Hummer in her music video. Would that be a creative stretch, or would the insertion of, of-- the Hummer be a relatively painless process?
T.L. STANLEY: Cars and booze are the most prevalent things in hip hop videos. So there's going to be a vehicle in that video, [MS. JADE SONG UNDER] and if someone wants to pay her to drive a Hummer instead of an Escalade, fine. [MS. JADE SONG UP FULL, THEN FADES] I mean, we are in a situation a little bit where the, the tail is wagging the dog --where some label would say -- particularly with an up and coming artist -- this artist has written a song, and it mentions this brand of alcohol - so let's go talk to that brand of alcohol, and see if they want to be involved. Do they want to sponsor this, this person's tour? Do they want to do some marketing? Because it could just as easily be another brand, and we'll go and talk to them.
BOB GARFIELD: When product placements in films were overdone, there was an audience backlash, and I expect to very soon see the same thing with these clumsy TV plugs that are everywhere. But is there something about youthful music audiences, especially hip hop, that so embraces the brand culture that there's no risk of turning off the listener? I mean Busta Rhymes writing Pass the Courvoisier, Part II hasn't seemed to infuriate anyone, you know, except possibly Hennessy and Martel.
T.L. STANLEY: Right. That hip hop audience is very brand-aware, but if someone starts rapping about household cleaning products, then-- [LAUGHTER] that will be a problem.
BOB GARFIELD: I just want to ask you about music videos. More and more you're seeing products actually pop up in those. Doesn't that cause a problem for MTV, for example? Don't those exposures -potentially irritate the advertisers on MTV who may be selling a competing product?
T.L. STANLEY: I'm not sure if their policy is really set in stone these days. Now, back in the day, you know, when MTV was younger, really the only thing they used to have to worry about pixilating out were pot leaves all over people's shirts and their hats, but now they do that for brands. If it's a big logo on someone's shirt, perhaps that'll be blurred out. But it's so prevalent that you couldn't possibly pixilate out every brand reference in a music video. That's all you would notice.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, we've come now to the last question, and I almost hesitate to ask it, but I'm going to anyway. This rash of product placements -- doesn't it compromise the art of popular music?
T.L. STANLEY: I think that depends on what kind of music you're talking about, how the reference is made. Hip hop is all about bling. It's about talking about what you have, showing off the spoils of your wealth, so you're wearing Prada, you're wearing Gucci, you're drinking Cristal-- it's-- very much accepted that it will be littered with brands. It's a different matter, of course, if you are a band like Radiohead. Just ain't gonna happen.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, Terry. Well, listen, thank you very much.
T.L. STANLEY: Absolutely. Good talking to you, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: T.L. Stanley covers entertainment for my favorite magazine, Advertising Age. [MS. JADE SONG UP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: There was a time when independent music producers of modest means could spend a few hundred bucks on a single and talk a programmer into some local radio air play. In fact, nearly half the chart-topping hits of rock & roll's golden age came from those independents, and all their hopes were pinned to those little records with the big holes --the 45 rpm single. On the Media's Rex Doane reports on: Where have all those singles gone?
REX DOANE: The 45 had been introduced as early as 1948, but it was the convergence of this emerging technology with the burgeoning youth culture that set off the explosion. Gene Sculatti has written about pop music for over 35 years and currently serves as the director of special issues for Billboard Magazine.
GENE SCULATTI: The 45 is just inextricably bound up with that whole-- late '50s through pretty much middle '60s period of popular music. I mean it's -it's the standard, and it's the-- it's the platter on which the meal arrives. I mean there's no -- there's almost no distinction between the content of what's on there and the format in which it's delivered. [JOHNNY ACE'S PLEDGING MY LOVE PLAYS]
REX DOANE: Jim Dawson is the co-author of the book What Was the First Rock & Roll Record?, and for Dawson Johnny Ace's Pledging My Love from 1955 signaled the true coming of age for the 45. [JOHNNY ACE'S PLEDGING MY LOVE UP AND UNDER]
JOHNNY ACE: FOREVER MY DARLING MY LOVE WILL BE TRUE ALWAYS AND FOREVER....
JIM DAWSON: That record which was a huge hit. Actually sold more 45 records than it sold 78's and showed that the young people had embraced the 45.
REX DOANE: Billboard's Gene Sculatti notes that long before the onslaught of music videos and the seeming endless parade of pop star pictorials and slick magazines, the 45 represented the only tangible link between artist and fan.
GENE SCULATTI: The names of these acts and the names of the songs and the labels -- there's all this iconography that's all that's available. It, it sort of adds to the mystery of the experience. You know what I mean?
REX DOANE: Consider, too, the ritual involved in playing a 45. Pop in a CD, and you can go fold laundry. But to play a 45, you must make a special commitment. Place the record on the turntable; lower the needle; and stay and listen until the music runs out. It's an archaic process that places special emphasis on that song for that moment -- a solitary throne for a favorite artist and a favorite tune. [45 RECORD BEGINS PLAYING -- WITH STATIC]
LITTLE RICHARD: OH MY SOUL-- BABE, BABE, BABE, BABY-- DON'T YOU KNOW MY LOVE IS TRUE WOOOOOO! OH HONEY, HONEY, HONEY, HONEY, HONEY-- GET UP OFF OF THAT MONEY LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE--
REX DOANE: To be sure, 45 collectors seem alarmingly fetishistic about such matters. They speak of label variations, B side oddities and the hopelessly obscure. It is an affliction, at times, only understood by the afflicted.
DICK BLACKBURN: If you've got a child who exhibits signs of complete vinyl mania, then you might send him to a 12-Step right away or, failing that, some sort of conditioning therapy.
REX DOANE: Dick Blackburn is a long-time 45 collector, currently working on a novel about his passion.
DICK BLACKBURN: I got into 45's because every time you put a needle on a new one, no matter which one you're trying to listen to, it's always the potential that you're going to get a mule's kick between the eyes of originality, eccentricity and genius. [TAPE UP]
LITTLE RICHARD: OH! MY SOUL....!! [END TAPE]
REX DOANE: While 45 collectors like Blackburn spend years picking through the bones -- those discarded disks from decades ago -- the record industry has responded with what one might term mild indifference. In the late 1980s, when 45's were abruptly ushered out of the stores along with the vinyl LP, to make way for compact disks, major labels feebly offered cassingles and CD singles for customers who wanted a song instead of an album. The cassingle quickly flopped, and the CD single has been steadily fading. In recent years tiny low budget labels have filled the void by pressing select oldies on 45 for juke box owners and operators to spin, and die hard collectors can turn to labels like the Brooklyn-based Norton Records whose passion for the format far exceeds minor concerns like making money.
BILLY MILLER: To me that's the number one format.
REX DOANE: Label co-founder Billy Miller. [CLASSIC EARLY R&R INSTRUMENTAL UP AND UNDER]
BILLY MILLER: You know, when you bottom line the profits, there is no profit in making 45's, so you have to just keep the momentum going and keep putting it out and hope you don't wake up and come to your senses.
REX DOANE: Even the fad interest in old records spurred on by club and hip hop deejays have largely passed the 45 by. Their interest in vinyl is strictly limited to LP's and 12 inch singles. And so the 45 rpm record now spends its twilight years in collectors' magazines, flea markets and garage sales. Inevitably, CD's too will be forced into an extinction of their own by some new technology, but as long as the Baby Boom endures, the unassuming 45 will retain a resonance that transcends the music caught in the grooves. [INSTRUMENTAL SWEETLY WAILS TO A CLOSE, THEN SOUND OF TURNTABLE TURNING] For On the Media in New York, I'm Rex Doane. [TURNTABLE SOUND FADES, THEME MUSIC COMES UP]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, and Mike Vuolo, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Anne Kosseff. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts and MP3 downloads at onthemedia.org, and email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media, from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC TAG]
- Back to story:
- September 17, 2004
-
Conservative Bloggers Vindicated, Advice for Leakers, and More
-
An 11-year-old and his 3D printer
-
Who’s gonna pay for this stuff?
-
A Journalistic Civil War Odyssey
-
A Source for Sources
-
A New Incentive for Cord Cutters
- Department of Justice Warrant Names Journalist as a Possible Leak Co-Conspirator
-
Brooke Gladstone + Cyndi Lauper
-
The Totally Legal Subpoena
-
Angelina Jolie's Secret Test Results
